A thermodynamic study of the palladium–hydrogen system at 245–352 °C and at pressures up to 34 atm

Hydrogen in Palladium and Storage Properties of Related Nanomaterials: Size, Shape, Alloying, and Metal-Organic Framework Coating Effects

One of the key issues for an upcoming hydrogen energy-based society is to develop highly efficient hydrogen-storage materials. Among the many hydrogen-storage materials reported, transition-metal hydrides can reversibly absorb and desorb hydrogen, and have thus attracted much interest from fundamental science to applications. In particular, the Pd-H system is a simple and classical metal-hydrogen system, providing a platform suitable for a thorough understanding of ways of controlling the hydrogen-storage properties of materials. By contrast, metal nanoparticles have been recently studied for hydrogen storage because of their unique properties and the degrees of freedom which cannot be observed in bulk, i. e., the size, shape, alloying, and surface coating. In this review, we overview the effects of such degrees of freedom on the hydrogen-storage properties of Pd-related nanomaterials, based on the fundamental science of bulk Pd-H. We shall show that sufficiently understanding the nature of the interaction between hydrogen and host materials enables us to control the hydrogen-storage properties though the electronic-structure control of materials.

Thermodynamics of the hybrid interaction of hydrogen with palladium nanoparticles

Palladium-hydrogen is a prototypical metal-hydrogen system. It is therefore not at all surprising that a lot of attention has been devoted to the absorption and desorption of hydrogen in nanosized palladium particles. Several seminal articles on the interaction of H with Pd nanocubes and nanoparticles have recently been published. Although each article provides for the first time detailed data on specific aspects of hydrogen in nanoparticles, they individually do not contain enough information to draw firm conclusions about the involved mechanisms. Here, we show that the large body of data available so far in literature exhibits general patterns that lead to unambiguous conclusions about the processes involved in H absorption and desorption in Pd nanoparticles. On the basis of a remarkably robust scaling law for the hysteresis in absorption-desorption isotherms, we show that hydrogen absorption in palladium nanoparticles is consistent with a coherent interface model and is thus clearly different from bulk Pd behaviour. However, H desorption occurs fully coherently only for small nanoparticles (typically smaller than 50 nm) at temperatures sufficiently close to the critical temperature. For larger particles it is partially incoherent, as in bulk, where dilute α-PdHx and high concentration β-PdHx phases coexist.